In this session, Utsa Bose will present his recently published translation titled Folk Tales from Meghalaya (Puffin/ Penguin Random House, 2024).
Translated from the Bengali original by Shobhona Bhattacharjee, with illustrations by Careen Joplin, it is a collection of sixteen short stories from the Garo, Khasi and Jaintia hills from the northeastern state of Meghalaya in India. The first part of this talk will situate the text and explore the idea of translating oral narratives from speech to text, as well as translating between languages (Bengali to English). It will then look at the nature of human-nonhuman relations within the collection, exploring ideas of transformation between different species and selves.
In particular, it will explore how the stories in the collection call for a vision of a life which does not see the relationship between human and nature as merely romantic, or call for a “return” to an antediluvian time. Instead, the entanglement between human and nonhuman worlds is seen as one which is transformative, and where the interaction with nature is filled with privilege and peril: humans change the environment, are changed by it in turn; humans kill, are killed, they die and are reborn—they turn into rivers, become birds, —yet the transformed selves do not ever become completely “others”; they often continue to speak with others of their species, with humans as well as nonhumans. What allows such a view, is, on one level, the notion of an animating spirit which manifests as life in different forms; on another level, what endures through many of transformation is the centrality of a shared language and speech, which allows humans and nonhumans to continue conversation, unencumbered by apparent difference.
In doing so, the talk argues that these stories decentralise speech as a human quality and locate it as connective form, which undergirds a world of transformation. The act of translating such a world then, becomes doubly significant, for it is language, and the act of translation which captures both the ephemeral (form) and eternal (language), the fleeting as well as continuous.
The second and final part of the talk will connect the view of human-nonhuman relations in this collection with some of the concerns of multi-species ethnography in anthropology. Recent anthropology scholarship, especially over the last two decades, has grappled with the question of connections between human and nonhuman worlds, as well as on questions of nonhumans and their agency calling for a “multi-species ethnography”, which, along with being an intervention within the field, is made all the more significant in the context of the climate crisis.
This section will be an exercise of reading alongside the projections of life as explored in these folktales from the northeastern hills of India, with some of the concerns of multispecies ethnography. In doing so, this talk will make a case for the use of translation, folk tales, and children’s literature as a way of living through the anxious present.
Utsa Bose is a second year DPhil candidate in History at the University of Oxford. His current research focuses on infectious diseases and pandemics in colonial South Asia between the late-19th/early 20th centuries. His research area(s) include histories of science, medicine and technology, environmental and medical humanities, science and technology studies (STS) and bioethics. He was also the Graduate Teaching Assistant for the MSt in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation (CLCT) between 2023-2024. He enjoys translating and writing fiction, and his translations have appeared in journals such as Asymptote, while his original fiction has been published by Sahitya Akademi, India’s National Academy of Letters.
Lunch will be provided.
